Ashley Peacock

Durable Objects @ Cloudflare & Author of Serverless Apps on Cloudflare: Substack:

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

I'm beyond excited to announce the release of my second book, Serverless Apps on Cloudflare! 📚

For several years, I've been building applications on @Cloudflare's modern and innovative cloud developer platform. I was blown away by how simple and quick it was to develop applications, alongside how intuitive it all felt.

This book is a culmination of those years learning the platform, distilled into easily-digestible chapters covering the core aspects of the platform. You'll learn everything from building an API and full-stack applications, to databases, caches, using AI, queues and so much more.

By the end, you'll have a solid foundation that will allow you to build all kinds of applications with Cloudflare.

The @CloudflareDev team has been adding new products and features at a rapid rate, with all the key ingredients needed for almost any application.

It's all serverless, so you pay for what you use, with no servers or instances to maintain. It really comes into its own with how it all integrates together. Do you want to connect your compute to your database? It's a few lines of configuration, and your code is injected with what it needs at runtime by Cloudflare, with no need to maintain any sensitive credentials.

In my opinion, this is what the likes of AWS, Azure and GCP wish their platforms were like. Sure, they are more vast in the products they offer, but Cloudflare likely has all the essential products and features you need to build great products and services without all the hassle and complexity.

If you're interested in giving Cloudflare a try, and want a helping hand on the key aspects of their developer platform, you can get your hands on the early release version of the book right now via @pragprog: https://t.co/acUVUSTjvD

#cloudflare #book #coding #programming #develop #AWS #azure #gcp #serverless #architecture #software

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

I think it depends. Everything in the book is relevant and would help you build an app / understanding on Cloudflare

LLMs can obviously “just do it” now, but if you want to understand the primitives, it does a great job at that (although doesn’t have newer stuff from the past 2 years or so, of course)

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

I'm beyond excited to announce the release of my second book, Serverless Apps on Cloudflare! 📚

For several years, I've been building applications on @Cloudflare's modern and innovative cloud developer platform. I was blown away by how simple and quick it was to develop applications, alongside how intuitive it all felt.

This book is a culmination of those years learning the platform, distilled into easily-digestible chapters covering the core aspects of the platform. You'll learn everything from building an API and full-stack applications, to databases, caches, using AI, queues and so much more.

By the end, you'll have a solid foundation that will allow you to build all kinds of applications with Cloudflare.

The @CloudflareDev team has been adding new products and features at a rapid rate, with all the key ingredients needed for almost any application.

It's all serverless, so you pay for what you use, with no servers or instances to maintain. It really comes into its own with how it all integrates together. Do you want to connect your compute to your database? It's a few lines of configuration, and your code is injected with what it needs at runtime by Cloudflare, with no need to maintain any sensitive credentials.

In my opinion, this is what the likes of AWS, Azure and GCP wish their platforms were like. Sure, they are more vast in the products they offer, but Cloudflare likely has all the essential products and features you need to build great products and services without all the hassle and complexity.

If you're interested in giving Cloudflare a try, and want a helping hand on the key aspects of their developer platform, you can get your hands on the early release version of the book right now via @pragprog: https://t.co/acUVUSTjvD

#cloudflare #book #coding #programming #develop #AWS #azure #gcp #serverless #architecture #software

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

Some pretty insane stats for a single site in a short timeframe!

If you want insights into the bots accessing your website, as well as the ability to block or charge them for access, you need Cloudflare infront of your site

Full info: https://t.co/6DhMn69iOo

[@levelsio @levelsio]

Meta is doing heavy heavy heavy scraping on all my sites this week too (and seemingly everyone else's sites now)

So much so that I got load average alerts for it today on one VPS

The fact that they're hitting url2og (my own screenshot service for all my sites) might they're scraping not just text but images too, so maybe they're working on an image, video or just world model

P.S. these stats are just from url2og not even my other sites!

You're welcome @finkd but maybe I should start charging you for it with @cloudflare 😊

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@ra_jeeves It’s one of my favourites! I recap all the other days in my posts too earlier in the week!

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

Cloudflare built a browser that runs INSIDE a Cloudflare Worker 🤯

Cloudflare Agents Week day 4 is here, and it's a banger:

🪁 Kitesurf: agent-first browser running on Workers
🕸️ WebMCP: Give any website an MCP interface
⚒️ The next generation of MCP is here
🔍 AI Search improvements + pricing announced
🤖 AI Readiness in the Dash & AEO diagnosis
🌎 Building an open Agentic Internet

🪁 Kitesurf: agent-first browser running on Workers 🪁

There are projects that come up from time to time that are uniquely Cloudflare, and Kitesurf is one of them. Workers are an insanely powerful primitive, and there is very little they can't do these days.

Kitesurf is a browser built for the agentic web. Chromium-backed browsers are large, and use a lot of memory. There simply isn't enough memory for every agent in the world to have a browser. That's where Kitesurf comes in, a lightweight alternative to Chromium-based browsers.

It uses WebAssembly, Dynamic Workers, Durable Objects and more to make this happen. And yes, it can run Doom.

Best of all, it's available in open beta to try today for free, via Browser Rendering's CDP endpoint and Quick Actions.

If you want to see it in action, there's a public playground too, linked below, as well as the full blog post - which is packed with interesting technical details!

🕸️ WebMCP: Give any website an MCP interface 🕸️

WebMCP is a new browser standard that lets any website expose itself via MCP. Rather than an agent having to click around the website, it can interact with it using MCP instead.

You could implement this yourself, but why would you, when Cloudflare can enable it on your site with one toggle?

You can enable this in the dashboard today under Agent Readiness > Labs. There's currently two groups of featuers you can enable, called packs, to help agents browser your website.

⚒️ The next generation of MCP is here ⚒️

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has evolved over time, and the latest iteration makes it simpler than ever. How? By making it so that an MCP server can be stateless. That removes the burden of sticky sessions and other complexities from running an MCP server.

With the rapid movement of the AI landscape, it's important for companies to move in the direction the puck is going. Once again, Cloudflare is ready to receive the puck, as stateless MCP servers have been possible on Cloudflare for some time.

That means, from day one of the specification being announced, it has been supported on Cloudflare when using the official MCP SDKs.

There's a bunch of other changes as part of this spec, including:

- Elicitation no longer needs an open stream
- Mcp-Method and Mcp-Name in HTTP headers, to avoid parsing request bodies for features such as rate limiting
- MCP now prefers pre-registered clients when the server and client already have a relationship, then Client ID Metadata Documents (CIMD) for dynamic registrations, with Dynamic Client Registration (DCR) as a fallback

And much more. This is a good one to read yourself, as there's a lot of technical depth to the article!

🔍 AI Search Improvements 🔍

AI Search is Cloudflare's offering to solve the problem of how you give your AI agent access to specific knowledge to improve its work. In simple terms, it makes the RAG aspect of your AI agents effortless.

AI Search already lets you ingest data into an R2 bucket, scrape your own website, along with an array of options at search time.

AI search can now:

- You no longer need a sitemap to ingest your website's data, Cloudflare will discover the pages automatically
- Get a single public endpoint for searching across a namespace (both /search and /mcp).
- Add a custom domain to your public AI search namespaces
- Add semantic search to your sites built on EmDash (Cloudflare's WordPress successor) with AI Search plugin

AI Search always identifies itself when crawling websites, and respects bot protections that website owners put in place.

Pricing is also being announced today, as AI Search has been in beta since its release. As always, there's a generous free plan too, with full details in the blog post.

🤖 AI Readiness in the Dash & AEO diagnosis Share of Voice

Getting your website ready for the agentic era is no small feat. There's a ton of protocols, and a bunch of considerations around how to make your website accessible to AI agents.

In April, Cloudflare launched a tool to check your website's readiness for AI agents. That tool is now available in the dashboard for all your websites hosted on Cloudflare.

Alongside the check, the tool provides actionable insights on how to improve your website's agent readiness.

Now, if you thought getting your website ready for agents was some dark art, then AEO takes that to another level.

AEO is the practise of getting your website content surfaced in public LLMs such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

Working out if your website is AEO optimised is incredibly hard. That's why Cloudflare is launching a new tool today that allows you to get insights into how your website performs on the AEO front, with insights such as:

- Citation Rate
- Prominence
- Mention Rate
- Share of Voice

Putting your website behind Cloudflare has always been a no-brainer, but it's rapidly becoming a deal breaker with the new tools available to websites hosted on Cloudflare, such as the new AEO tool.

🌎 Building an open Agentic Internet 🌎

AI agents are a new kind of web user, they are already overtaking humans in terms of request volume.

Every request has a paying human behind it, so if you treat agents the same way you do web scrapers, you're potentially blocking paying customers.

That's why Cloudflare is working hard to set the standards to make the web ready for the agentic era. These are based on open standards such as x402, MCP, Web Bot Auth and PACT.

There's four pillars that Cloudflare believes paves the way for an Agentic web:

- Readable, so agents can read content cheaply via Markdown (and Kitesurf, a lightweight agent-first browser!)
- Discoverable, meaning agents can find things through AI Search, and sites measure their agent visibility with AEO
- Callable, with sites exposing actions directly to agents via WebMCP and Code Mode
- Payable, with agents paying per use with Wallets and x402. Monetization Gateway lets sites charge agents in a few clicks, replacing broken ad models of what came before.

Ultimately, Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet. Today, it is reaffirming that aim in the era of the agentic web, with the aim to enable AI agents and website owners to thrive on the agentic internet.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading - it was a pretty chonky one today, and there's one more day of announcements tomorrow! What did you think of today's announcements?

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@RPLEGENDYt1 Oh I see, no idea - perhaps in future but suspect no current plans (but not involved directly in the project)

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@MathurAditya7 Who needs a Firefox or a Chrome when you have a much lighterweight version that uses 4x less memory 👀

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@alanslkwong As in you tested it and this happened?

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@roatsie

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@soubiran_ @ghostwriternr Another day to go 👀

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@z4v3n Emdashes or other?

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@jhahimanshu653 Let me know how it goes!

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@0xRapid Emdashes are really common in professial writing, my book is littered with them! That’s why AI uses it a lot, as tons of professional writing uses it, but they learnt that from humans 😅

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

I know what this is and you’re not ready to see something this cool, drops in ~5 hours or so!

[Kari Linder 🪩🎨 @kkblinder]

My favorite image of Cloudflare Agents Week goes out tomorrow

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@z4v3n I am heavily biased but it’s such a good platform, and it workes beautifully for the agentic world, recommend giving it a try!

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@RPLEGENDYt1 What do you mean?

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@jhahimanshu653 It’s super cool, lots of cool stuff today!

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@jhahimanshu653 Reading the blogs?

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@shlomokabareti And we’re glad to have you 🫡

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@bcjordan Or @ruifigueira who I only just found on X 👀

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@oddhash It’s going to change the game for sure to have such lightweight browsers accessible

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@ravistao Not too sure!

[Ashley Peacock @ashleypeacock]

@bcjordan It’s pretty early stages, a ton works - it can even run DOOM! Not sure about your specifics though, @imluisduarte might know!